


Forget Myself

by SevenBetter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dark Reylo, F/M, Fix-It, I Don't Even Know, I have rectified everything I saw wrong with the central plot, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Posted in two parts because I don't think anyone could handle my ideas all in one go, Redeemed Ben Solo, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, both of them in the same story, but i'm trying anyway, keep reading to find out why, yep that's right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:13:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22136101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SevenBetter/pseuds/SevenBetter
Summary: A tear slips out and tracks down the side of his face, its path ending up inside the fissure of his scar.He wants to believe that's wrong, wants to be believe in the trust he saw in her eyes, and the relieved tremble in her hand as she joined it with his.He wants to believe her.But that's what Ben and Rey are best at, it would seem. Believing in things that aren't true.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 8
Kudos: 60
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics, The Rise of Skywalker: Fix-It Fic Edition





	1. Oath

**Author's Note:**

> Like many of us, I left the theater confused and fairly unhappy.
> 
> I spent the 45 minute drive home feeling each piece of this story fall into my head like many tiny anvils. 
> 
> Once it had built itself within my mind, it would not let me go. I began obsessing over details and conversations and what they might say versus what they really mean.
> 
> In conclusion: this is how I think it should have ended. I didn't just write a next chapter, I tried to fix what was wrong in this one.

Work and chapter titles from David Ignatow's poem, ["Listening."](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36651/listening-56d219ff0f4da)

\-------

Rey rises to her feet inside the dank, rusted out chamber, red light reflecting off her face.

The red light is reflecting off her _other_ face too.

The one she knows isn't really there. 

Yet it seems so real, as real as all her other brief, bracing visions. 

Her skin is paler, devoid of the color a lifetime on Jakku had imparted her. 

Her eyes are amber, sunken and rimmed in red. Her black robe is flowing. It would obscure her face with darkness if not for the glow of the saber, double-ended and spitting with the same barely restrained power as Kylo's.

_Kylo._

She's never looked more like his equal than what swims in her vision before her. _What might he think if he saw her like this? What might he say?_

It calls to her, draws her closer on soundless whispers and with invisible, beckoning fingers.

She heeds it, hypnotized.

She reaches out a hand, wondering absently if her skin is as cold as it looks.

Her hand falls right through where her cheek ought to be. She blinks, gasps, and the vision is gone.

Just herself, and the empty, barren room, once home to the most powerful and insidious man to ever curse the galaxy. 

That man has risen again. And now, a sudden edge of knowledge blooms inside her, like a deep breath of air after being trapped too long underwater. A sudden expansion, a sudden clarity.

Rey knows where to find him. And just as she was drawn to this vision of herself, of who she could become, she is drawn to him, too.

She heeds it. 

\-------

Kylo shivers as their sabers clash on the wreck. There is a ferocity in Rey's every move he cannot account for. Perhaps she is only growing more powerful.

It scares him.

As the fight wears on and they both grow more exhausted, no one manages to gain control. They squint through the spray, wincing at the salt water in their eyes, gritting their teeth as they struggle to maintain a foothold on the slick surface of the sunken ship.

Just when he thinks he might get the upper hand, she manifests some cunning move to push him back. Just when she seems poised to land a killing blow, something always falters, wavers. As in everything else, their energy, their power, seem perfectly split. Always destined to balance each other out.

Without warning or signal from the Force, a voice rings out in Kylo's head. 

_Ben._

He feels the solitary word like a punch to his gut. 

There in his mind, is his mother. 

He's never known her to have such Force power. To project herself to him. Has she always been able to do this?

No. He's sure of it.

She would have visited him a million more times before this, if she could have. 

So, if not before...

Why now?

He begins to realize why now, as he sees his mother lay down on a stone slab, an intense look of concentration on his face.

He thinks back to Luke, sitting on that stone slab on Ahch-To, appearing before him on Crait, as clearly as though he were real.

 _No,_ some corner of his mind protests weakly.

"Ben," she says again, staring up from where she lays prone, her eyes dark, and distant, and fond. "It's not too late, honey."

 _No_.

"Every day that you wake up, you have a chance to make a choice." 

_NO!_ His brain screams, as he feels her presence in the landscape of the Force grow weaker. Her voice becomes raspier, quieter.

"The next time you wake up, what choice will you make?"

He feels his mouth go dry, feels his hands go numb. 

His mother is dying. And all he can do is watch, and feel, but not intercede.

He thinks of that day a lifetime ago, seated in his TIE fighter screaming through space.

With the chance to blow up her ship, his finger hovering over where he could fire a missile.

He hesitated. He didn't press it.

_I don't want her to die._

"I love you, honey." She says, and despite everything he's done, everything he's taken away from her, her voice is so warm. So honest.

He feels as her presence drains away. He wants to linger in it, grasp onto any remaining tendrils she left behind. He wants to stay there with her, in his mind. 

But in life, he stands on top of the fallen Death Star, faced with his greatest enemy and the only person in the galaxy whom he suspects might really know him.

He's drawn back by a sharp lance of pain, a screaming, burning sensation he's felt before. But never so acutely.

Rey has taken advantage of his momentary distraction, and the saber is burning through his abdomen.

He crumples, falls, gasping, the pain so blinding he can't even muster the words to tell her she's done the right thing, that the galaxy will be better off without him. 

He expects to see triumph in her gaze, as she falls to her knees over him. He expects her to exact another killing blow, ending this once and for all. 

But when her face swims into his flickering vision, all he sees is regret. Remorse, and pain, and confusion, her teeth bared as though there is still a threat near her, as though she still has something to fight against.

As his slips out of consciousness, the last thing he feels is her small, warm hand against his torn and bleeding flesh.

\-------

Rey doesn't know from where the power comes, or how she manages to conjure it. But this man is beyond redeeming, beyond saving. So now, he must be vanquished.

She is plunging her saber into Kylo Ren, a sense of relief flaring to life inside her.

She and those she loves are immensely safer, now that he will be gone.

That feeling is extinguished within a second.

Suddenly she is overwhelmed by the presence of...Leia. All of their memories together pass across her mind's eye in the span of a second, and then, Rey realizes why her memories have overtaken her, in this moment.

Leia is gone. Her weak presence in the Force had burned hot and strong for a mere moment before vanishing altogether.

Rey knows, with some bone-deep knowledge she cannot explain, that Leia wanted this to happen.

Suddenly she gets a scant glimpse into Kylo's mind, and knows, with that same depth of certainty, that Leia had spoken to him.

That she had used her life force to speak to him. And as she did, something blinked awake inside him. Some chance for reversal.

Some distant, desperate part of him that wanted to be good again. 

And now Rey has snuffed out any chance of that good part growing.

Kylo Ren had the chance to be saved. Ben Solo had the chance to come back.

She's just destroyed it.

She falls to her knees before him, staring at the way his blood streams from his torso, mixing with the water that clings to the ship and snaking away in diluted red rivulets.

She looks up at his face, his pallor worse than she's ever seen it, wet hair plastered around his head.

His eyes are soft in a way they have never been before.

 _No,_ her mind protests.

Another thread of that bone-deep instinct: this isn't how it's supposed to end. 

She presses a hand to his abdomen, then joins one with the other, and chants those two thoughts to herself, scarcely knowing why, repeating them with a fervor that causes her to sweat, and tremble.

_No._

This isn't how it's supposed to end.

_No!_

_This isn't how it's supposed to end._

His wound heals. She feels his flesh knit and his blood reabsorb under her own fingers. But his life does not grow stronger.

She tries harder and harder, channeling more of her energy into him through the shiny pink scar, the only witness to the former wound. But as more seconds pass, the truth becomes clear. Tears leak from her eyes, invisible among the salt water that surrounds her. 

She's too late.

The presence of Kylo Ren has begun to fade from the Force. His wound may be healed, but she was too late. Kylo is not coming back. 

Neither is Ben.

She falls back onto her heels, stares at his body in the slate-gray light of the stormy sky looming over a roiling sea.

His body, always so powerful, coiled with muscle and waiting to strike, taut with tension and practically vibrating with the suppressed motion always threatening to burst from him.

He's gone still, now. As still and cold as a slab of white marble, his breadth and power only making him look leaden now, as opposed to threatening. 

She rises from her crouch, thoughts frantic, as she realizes what she's done.

She has invalidated Leia's sacrifice. She has robbed her greatest mentor of the woman's last chance to save her only child. 

Leia went to her death believing he could be saved, yet Rey could not share in that hope. And now, she's made sure that hope will never come true.

She thinks of exile, of banishment, of solitude and a lifetime of the loneliness she was so desperate to escape. 

_So lonely,_ he had told her, the first time they spoke, while she was strapped in the interrogation chair, _you imagine an ocean..._

_I see the island._

Moments later, he had told her not to be afraid. _I feel it too,_ he'd said.

He will never feel anything again, because of her.

That loneliness, and the ocean, and the island, will be her atonement.

\-------

Kylo gasps, taking a deep, painful breath just as a wave breaks against the Death Star. He inhales some of the ocean's spray, causing him to cough, and every tense of his abdomen causes a sharp, lancing jab to go through his wound.

He's alone, Rey's warm hand and Rey herself gone from his view, and when he searches, weakly, through the Force, he knows she isn't nearby. 

He reaches for the wound, to determine if it bleeds still, but his glove meets nothing but shiny pink skin, the same as a long-healed scar.

He is alive, his wound is gone. He has woken up.

_The next time you wake up, what choice will you make?_

He staggers to his feet, leaning against a canon that protrudes from the ship.

His hand drifts over the contours of his saber. He's barely regained his balance when he's sucked under by another vision.

This time it's not of his mother, nor is it of anyone else.

It's him, bowing before Palpatine, having the Sith Lord's power transferred into himself. It necrotizes him, turns his veins black and his skin a sickly gray.

But he gains ultimate power. He sees planets decimated, peoples subjugated, total control over the galaxy. The only sort of power that can push back against the consuming fear that lives inside him every moment.

He sees that throne, hewn from black, rough rock, become his new home. He sees himself revel in the endgame, in the outcome for which he has fought and slaughtered for so many years.

But before he can descend into this eventuality completely, something else intrudes.

Briefly, just snapshots, like a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, but lasting longer, growing stronger.

The promises made at the Jedi Academy. The idea that this terrifying, all-consuming power he felt could one day be mastered, could be honed, into something that he could control and understand, into something that makes himself feel safe.

He sees himself traversing the galaxy, protecting people. He witnesses people thinking of him as often, as they do now.

But in gratitude, rather than fear.

In this vision he sees Rey, her eyes bright and her posture open, pulling a curtain back on a sunlit room, asking him in. Reaching for him, intending to caress rather than injure.

Images of the Sith throne push into him again.

The two outcomes war for supremacy in his mind, each battling for his future.

Kylo knows both are impossible. Neither vision can be his future, for innumerable reasons he can and cannot name. 

He will not be led through life by false promises again. Not when he came so close to dying, but has been given another shot.

_The next time you wake up, what choice will you make?_

He turns, staring out at the vast, churning water. This ocean doesn't know who he is, or what he's done. It tosses and turns all the same.

Kylo rears back and throws his saber into its depths. It disappears into the fog and Kylo's eyes slip shut, imagining he can hear the splash, imagining he can see the saber sink to the bottom of this tumultuous, destructive place, where its red light will never be ignited again.

\--------

Ben Solo opens his eyes, thinking of a different ocean, and loneliness, and an island.

\---------

Rey's barely been on Ahch-To six hours when he appears to her. 

She's sleeping in one of the stone huts, a rotting old cot her only respite from the hard ground, a fire lit by her own hand nearby, making the lingering dampness of her clothes bearable.

 _Rey,_ her mind mumbles, and she bursts awake. He's there, standing in the corner, one hand clutched over his wound. 

_He's alive._

He's breathing, and blinking, and staring at her in a mixture of shock and relief and she doesn't know what to say, or what to do, or-

He isn't wet anymore, and she can't hear any distant roar of the waves, so she surmises he's no longer on the wreck, and-

Something is different. 

_He_ is different.

She senses his energy, picks it apart thread by thread, and he watches her as she does. She gasps, as she realizes what she's sensing. Her voice is so soft, so hesitant, as she seeks to confirm it.

"Ben?"

He nods, weary face falling into something like relief, and she slides to the end of the cot, blanket falling off her. 

"What...what happened?" She asks, feeling something from him so benevolent that she keeps shaking herself, sure she must be fabricating it.

"I made a different choice." He states simply, and his voice sounds so strong, so sure.

She isn't fabricating it. It's real: as real as the flames that reflect off his face, as real as the stones underneath her feet.

He has changed, because he has chosen to. Her eyes well up with tears, relief and happiness and some measure of disbelief. 

Rey realizes that this place, the rest of her days spent alone, is not her destiny. 

She chooses her destiny, just like he did. And this is not what she chooses.

"We can defeat him," she says plainly, "together. Neither of us is strong enough on our own, but with your power on the side of the Light, I think we can-"

"Not we can. We _will,_ " he says, that same sense of surety in his voice, and she finds herself believing in it, taking it inside herself, letting it fuel that final seed of hope she formerly tried so desperately to kill.

"Meet me on Exegol," she watches as he nods, "you feel it too? You know the way to get there?"

"I..." he hesitates, looks off into somewhere she can't see. "I've been there before." 

"Don't be ashamed," Rey states, with the same sense of certainty, "our knowledge is our strength."

He takes a deep breath, nodding to her, and holds his hand out. She stares at it, at his long fingers, the small round shadows thrown by his knuckles.

Rey thinks of the first time this happened. The firelight, the hut. Both of them reaching out.

Then, the second time, his hand held aloft in the throne room, his eyes begging her. _Please._

She projects to him that image. Bodies surrounding them, the room on fire. His pleading gaze; her horror, and anger, that he still chose to be Kylo Ren. 

"I wanted to touch your hand. Ben's hand." She says, with a half sob. 

He swallows hard. "You couldn't have. I wasn't him, then." He closes his eyes, seeming to bear a wave of pain. When he blinks them open, he looks right at her. "But I am now."

Two more tears track down her face and she sees his proffered hand twitch, with an urge to brush them away, but instead she lets them drip from her jaw. 

She takes his hand.

But she doesn't stop there.

She steps closer, into his embrace, close enough that she must tilt her head to keep her eyes on him. Hands knit, hesitant, they both lean in until they meet in a kiss, soft and slow and chaste, just enough to communicate those words they have said so many times before.

_I feel it too._

She pulls back, and he vanishes, and she closes her eyes, thinking of that X-Wing buried in the dark water outside. She calls upon the Force, and what compels her to gather her power is an endless thrum of _He's alive, he's alive, he's alive._

She sets the ship gently on a grassy, flat cliff, thinking of her path into the Unknown Regions.

Uncaring how far she must travel, or how she must toil, if she gets to see him again.

\-------

When she lands on Exegol, eyeing that ominous, trapezoidal fortress, fear grabs hold of her again.

_What if their power, even combined, isn't enough?_

_What if something happens and she cannot save him?_

_Will he feel any temptation to return to the Dark? It controlled him for so long. Can one day, one experience, truly turn him as the events of today seem to have done?_

She lurks, far away from the fortress' underbelly, and waits for his arrival. _Where are you?_ She sends out into the Force

But before she can search for his answer, a voice like a death knell calls out to her.

"I knew you would come."

Her hand tightens on her saber hilt. She can't explain how she knows it's him, but as before, she is utterly certain.

"Palpatine," she intones aloud. 

"That is not the same by which you should call me, child." His voice is the lowest, must guttural croak, and she swallows, trying hard not to vomit at just the sound.

"And how would you have me address you?" She mocks, "Emperor?"

He laughs: a cold, mirthless sound.

"Perhaps 'grandfather' would be more apt." 

His words bewilder her. But before she can question him, a vision is forced into her mind, with such abruptness and strength that she is utterly unable to resist it:

_A boy, with her same narrow nose, raised in a cold, empty mansion with people he knows all along are not his family. Stricken with a sense of wrongness all his life, positive that there was something essential and terrible he didn't now._

_That same boy as a man, the truth of his parentage revealed to him: Sheev Palpatine, thought to be dead, living on as a fragmented soul somehow contained into a new corporeal form. Palpatine and a servant woman, unlucky enough to be the subject of his relentless romantic attentions._

_The boy she bore was a beacon of hope to her. She could feel a goodness, a rightness in him, that she knew was a direct betrayal of his father._

_That goodness and rightness carried her through, until the day the child was snatched from her arms._

_She went mad, doomed to spend the rest of her life in a sterile cell, crying out for a child who would never have a single memory of her._

_When all of this dawned on the man, he ran. Jumped from planet to planet, hunted always by the one he had been told was his father. The one who stirred some sense of evil within him he had so deeply buried._

_Somehow, with the help of a Wookie who was willing to take modest payment and not ask any questions, he found a planet that lasted, where he remained undetected._

_He met a woman, a scavenger, with flinty eyes and a smooth, soft face, whose determination to survive gave him a sense of comfort he's never felt before._

_When she becomes pregnant, only then does he tell her the whole truth._

_Of his father, and his father's power, and how he will always, forever be hunted._

_Eight years later, when that nightmarish day finally approaches, they are ready._

_They sell her, to a junk trader they know is too self-absorbed to pay attention and realize who she is, but not cruel enough to kill her off for sport._

_They leave the planet, knowing they will be found._

_And they are. During each moment of their torture and death, they shield their minds from Palpatine. He never learns of her existence._

_They die in the comfort of knowing their daughter is safe._

_But as Palpatine recedes into dormancy, as he watches the First Order rise, so too does he hear whispers of a girl. A girl whose face is described so much like his son's. A girl whose Force abilities make no sense, considering who she is, where she is from, and her lack of training._

_Eventually, after years of kidnapping and torturing those old enough to have witnessed her upbringing, he discovers the truth._

_Rey is the last bastion of his bloodline._

In her vision, her parents run from her, to a rusty, packed transport just about to depart from Jakku.

It is the clearest, truest view she has ever had of them.

She can't help it, when she tries to run after them, to keep them in her sight, pushing herself harder and faster, desperate to close a distance that cannot be surmounted.

But now, all has been revealed to her. And with that, the vision goes up in smoke. She's breathing hard, the bottom edge of the floating Sith temple mere inches in front of her, her ship far off, back in the sand.

"Now you know the truth," he states, and Rey can see his amber eyes glowing from the entrance. "I am your only family." She stares towards him in the darkness. He's like a critical patient in a Med wing, a dozen tubes and wires the only thing left keeping him alive, yet the air around her, every grain of sand, the entire planet - pulses with his power. 

_Ben, Ben where is Ben?_ She casts about desperately in the Force, her effort desperate and unfocused, and gleans nothing.

_What if he changed his course of action?_

What if he's taken advantage of his new frame of mind and escaped from all this: stolen a ship and charted a course for the most distant system he can find, away from her, away from the last reminders of the turmoil and anguish that have controlled every moment of his life? All of her assurance, all of the warmth and comfort and hope she felt, slides completely away, leaving naught but a cold void in its wake.

She thinks back to her vision inside the wreck.

To her saber, and her robes, and the way it spoke to her, the way it tantalized.

The place where she belongs.

She has always wanted, so badly, to belong.

She squints ahead through the fog, staring him down. Her only family.

She takes a step closer, and Palpatine smiles.

\-------

Ben charts his course through the galaxy frantically, making hyperspace jumps with hands flying across the control panel, skirting around checkpoints and system borders in an effort to get to her faster. 

He doesn't want her there alone.

 _She's not alone,_ he reminds himself.

And neither is he.

\--------

Darth Sidious leads her through the Temple, telling her the tale of his survival, of the loyal cretins who helped keep him alive across decades, waiting impatiently for the day when he would initiate his return.

It was like hibernation, he says with malicious glee, his soul incubated within a shadowy, dark corner in the Force. Then, when Ben Solo was conceived, he knew from that very instant that when the child was born, his power would be unparalleled.

From the moment Ben could form words, Palpatine was there. Twisting his thoughts, twisting his feelings, subtly enough that when Ben became Kylo Ren, he could convince himself that doing so was a choice, and not compelled by an outside power, but the numerous voices that had spoken to him since childhood. Including the voice of his grandfather. 

From time time Ben was an adolescent, that voice was always Snoke. Palpatine gestures overhead, to the glowing green tanks where a dozen more Snokes float, and Rey finally knows now that the Snoke she knew was not aged, that he was formed with such hideousness already ascribed.

"I could have sent a dozen more, to help invade his psyche," Palpatine taunts. "But I didn't need them. Any of them. Because suddenly you appeared," his grin reveals black teeth and blood-red gums around them. "My own blood, more powerful than anything I could attempt to create."

"What did you hope I would do?"

"Kill him," Palpatine states honestly. "With your birth, I no longer needed him. He had been made your natural enemy by circumstance, and I had hoped you would kill him. I knew, given the right opportunity, that you would."

Rey furrows her brow, and takes a moment to be utterly certain her mind is shielded.

_She has found the first chink in his armor._

Despite his claims, Palpatine is not all-knowing.

For if he did, he would know of her attempt to kill Ren on the wreck only hours ago.

He would know how she decided not to. How she used her power, borne of this Sidious' own bloodline, to save him.

"That opportunity never came." She states, astounded by her own ability to sound mournful. 

Perhaps she's simply borrowing from all the other things she has to mourn. 

A sound across the cavernous hall draws her attention, but it is nothing. It isn't him.

 _Where are you, Ben?_ she sends out desperately, casting it through the Force like a fishing net, carefully hiding the projection from the half-dead creature who stands before her.

She grits her teeth, desperate for him to arrive, sick with anticipation.

However it ends, she wants all of this to be over.

She cannot do this alone. She needs more time to wait for him.

Blessedly, Palpatine's capacity for malice is outweighed only by his ego, and he continues to regale her with tales of when he was a Senator, when he became Emperor, how he controlled Vader. How he made the entire Skywalker line enslaved to his plans. 

He has no shortage of stories about his own greatness. Rey suffers them, forcing herself not to fidget, but knows that soon, he will demand she undergo the change he has shown her. The one in her vision.

_Pale skin. Red-rimmed eyes. Dark cloak. Sharp teeth, built to injure._

She suspects that once it's done, there's no coming back. 

\-------

Ben's craft lands roughly on the surface of Exegol, skids to a stop. It took him so much longer to arrive than he anticipated.

He can see Rey's ship far off further from the fortress, and try as he might, he can't get a clear read on her mind.

_How long has she been here? Are she and Palpatine fighting? Why didn't she wait for him?_

He finds no answers; the bond is shuttered. But he knows she's nearby.

He panics for a moment, unable to properly commune with her.

But he knows no matter what he found, no matter what he saw, he would still go to her.

It's that revelation that spurs him to jump from his seat, snatching his lone blaster. He ignores the faint pulses of pain in his stomach and sprints forward.

He encounters a few shadowy figures as he hurtles towards the throne room. Somehow, the blaster is enough. He keeps sending weak pulses into the bond. _I'm here, I'm here, please, hold on._

\-------

She wears the robe. She and Palpatine kneel on a dais, on opposite sides of a wide stone, upon which rests that double-barreled saber staff, folded. 

Rey can feel the darkness creeping into her, Palpatine pressing in on all sides, and she's letting it.

She was right. The Sith power does make her skin feel cold. 

"Do you, blood of my blood, accept the mantle of the Sith, to take the throne that is your fate, and to let your power be guided by my wisdom?"

Among that cold, swirling wrongness, curling into her mind like smoke, she feels something. A glimmer of something nearby.

A glimmer of _someone._

"I shall accept this power..." she says, and watches Palpatine grin, "and be guided by your wisdom." The glimmer grows stronger, in a corner of her mind that is still her own. "On one condition."

His smile drops, black teeth vanishing from view, and stares down at her, eyes glowing. 

"I offer you all this, and you have...conditions? You are hardly in the position to be making demands." He scolds.

"You need me," she reminds him with conviction, "I am young, and healthy. The full extent of my power is not yet known, by anyone. Even you. Many in the galaxy trust me. It is only through me that your plan is achievable." She meets his gaze, daring him to defy her.

He clenches his jaw, spittle having gathered at the corners of his mouth, but he concedes.

"Name your condition."

"I will share my throne, as equals, with Kylo Ren."

Palpatine's hideous face contorts even further in his fury.

" _Traitor_!" He bellows, standing over her, ascending the stairs and staring down at her still knelt form. "You value that man, that failed experiment in the Sith over your own blood? Over your last family?"

"No, I-"

"I do not need to know your reasons. I see your every thought, every proclivity." Or so he thinks. "You are a slave to mortal desires, human carnality has made you weak."

Never mind that it was his own carnal weakness which made her. 

"You would split your power, your ultimate, everlasting power, in two because you _think you're in love with a man,_ " He accuses, flying deeper and deeper into anger.

Force lightning begins crackling along his hands and despite her intention to let him rant, she did not expect this.

She snatches the saber in her hand and rises, flicking it open and illuminating both ends just in time to deflect a bolt of lightning aimed right at her chest.

The red glow no longer compels her. No longer calls to her. It feels wrong, heavy and ill-fitting in her hand, but she wields it with every last shred of her training.

She is careful, though, never to exact offensive blows. Only to stop Sidious from hurting her.

She can sense Ben drawing closer now. His nearness fortifies her, their bond clears that creeping fog that had been enveloping her brain, the Darkness. 

She sees him coming for her, skidding around corners and heaving his weak body up stone stairs. His jaw is set, eyes determined. 

Soon, they will finally be able to execute their plan. _Rey,_ she finally hears him call. She can see him, but can tell from her view of his mind that he cannot see her. 

Suddenly, that doesn't matter: he's surrounded.

By his own knights. The men who were once loyal to him. She draws her mind's eye away from his face, long enough to see all of him.

He's armed only with a blaster.

Abruptly, as though she's known all along, she realizes what she needs to do. 

"Wait, grandfather, _please!_ "

The use of the endearment gives Palpatine pause, and his hands lower. "Grandfather," she repeats, chest heaving, "allow me to justify what I ask."

He stares at her, and waits, and she powers down the saber, flicking her wrist so the lower half whirls up and snaps together.

Her hand disappears within the wide folds of her robe.

She closes her eyes for a moment, sees Ben nod, and her arm reaches behind her back, diagonally from her right hip up towards her left shoulder.

Far away, in another wing of the temple, Ben's right hand comes down from where it was held behind him, clutching a saber hilt.

Two of the knights reel back in shock, and some part of him, some part that's distinctly _Ben,_ throws his hands out in triumph, dips at the knees, relishes the moment. 

It's a double-ended saber he's never seen before. When he ignites it, cold dread and confusion take him over.

 _Red._ Yet Rey was the one to slip it to him.

He doesn't have time to contemplate this because suddenly he's being rushed, his knights attacking on all sides. He must anticipate their every intent, determine from the speed of their thoughts who will strike in what order, so that he can deliver counter-blows in the perfect sequence.

He does it, though. He parries and stabs and swings, desperate for the moment when he can run, and find her, and understand why this is the weapon she held.

\-------

"You are right," she says evenly to Palpatine, staring him right in the eyes. "I have fallen prey to weakness. I am subject to the desires of mere mortals." She ascends one step, maintaining her gaze. "But I am a Sith now. And Sith do not apologize for what they want, they take it." Another step. "I want this throne, and I want Kylo Ren. And I shall have both."

He opens his mouth but she finds herself inexplicably emboldened, and speaks over him. "You said it yourself, when he was born, his power was unprecedented. It still has the chance to be developed by the correct hand." A final step, so that they are even with one another again, the throne just a few more steps ahead of them. "He is subject to human weaknesses as well. He wants me too, and will let himself be shaped by me. Under the guise of my love, you can impart your wisdom upon him as well."

The promise is too much for him to refuse.

The chance to control both of the most important beings the galaxy, for him to bear twin trophies of his power, one Light and one Dark, both turned by his hand, is something not even he could have planned.

"Yes," he rasps in a gravelly half-whisper, "yes. I will let you keep your warlord. I will let you give him the illusion of equality, the illusion of control, while I hold the strings."

Rey lets a feral grin stretch across her face, and Palpatine mirrors it.

"But it must come from me. He will never submit to you, to all of this, the way I have. I must be the one to ask. Surely you understand."

Palpatine adds a slow nod to that creeping grin, and that's when she hears it, soft and close like it's right in her ear, even though he's all the way across the room.

"Rey?"

\-------

Ben stumbles through a low doorway slung with vines, and emerges into the shadows of the throne room. 

His knights are dead. He is alive. 

So wondrously and gloriously alive, but his stomach feels sick now, even more than it hurts, and...

...Rey is across the room. Everything in him is telling him it can't possibly be her, that creature in a dark robe standing on a dais, halfway up the stairs to the altar. 

But he can feel her, through the Force. He can feel that it's really her. He hears her speak.

"I am a Sith now. And Sith do not apologize for what they want, they take it...I want this throne, and I want Kylo Ren. And I shall have both."

Ben gasps.

"He is subject to human weaknesses as well. He wants me, and will let himself be shaped by me. Under the guise of my love, you can impart your wisdom upon him, too."

_No. No, no no._

He's too late. 

He left her too long, with this man and all his addictive, intoxicating promises.

Rey has fallen for those promises.

She's been powerless, loveless, and without a family her entire life. 

Now she's bargaining, believing that by just joining the other side, she can gain all three.

He tries to speak into her mind, to tell her that he's here, that she has to stop, but some thick mist has shrouded her brain. It makes Ben feel cold, and he's taken over by a deep sense of foreboding.

She is making the same mistake he almost did. She believes Palpatine. That husk of a person standing with her on the stairs.

The former emperor finally replies.

"Yes, I will let you keep your warlord."

Ben realizes, with a start, that they are speaking of him. _Warlord._ It feels wrong. That's not who he is anymore. He hasn't been that person in a long time.

_What happened on Ahch-To? Was it all a ruse? Had she already sworn allegiance to Palpatine, and only needed to lure him here?_

A tear slips out and tracks down the side of his face, its path ending up inside the fissure of his scar.

He wants to believe that's wrong, wants to be believe in the trust he saw in her eyes, and the relieved tremble in her hand as she joined it with his.

He wants to believe her.

But that's what he and she are best at, it would seem. Believing in things that aren't true.

Soon he's sobbing, quietly, watching them discuss her ascension to the throne, and he knows there's only one thing left for him to do now. 

He won't make it out of this alive. But he might take this monster, and all his false promises to Rey, with him.

He wipes his face on the thin sleeve of his tunic and strides forward. He whispers her name, and through that fog that is obscuring her Force sensitivity she realizes that he's there. She whirls around.

Her eyes are halfway between her native hazel and a sickly yellow. Palpatine steps back, recedes into a dark corner, and watches.

She descends the stairs, folds of her robe swirling around her. There's a manic glee in her eyes, as she draws close enough for him to finally make out the rest of her face inside the deep hood.

"Kylo," she says softly, and Ben blinks. 

Hearing that name from her mouth doesn't feel right. The tears begin anew.

"Rey, what are you doing?"

"I'm not Rey anymore, Ren. Not even a Palpatine," she croaks, "I am Darth Perfidia. That throne is mine. But I want you to join me on it."

"Rey, you don't have t-"

"Think of it," shes says, and when she grins, her teeth look thinner; sharper. "With our combined power on one throne. No one would be able to wrest control of the galaxy from us. Ren, our supremacy would last forever. Truly the Final Order."

He feels Palpatine monitoring, so keenly, what is in both their minds. Ben can't reach her through the bond: he would see it. 

"I know you think he can give you what you want, but you're wrong, he's lying about all of it, the same way he lied to me." 

"Stop," she commands, and steps even closer, looking up into his eyes. Her hood falls back a little, and the planes of her face look so much like the woman he knows, the one he knows is disappearing.

She whispers his name, so softly he can only make out the "-en," and for a moment, he can't be certain by which name he's been called. "Everything I promised you, everything we dreamt of. It can be ours." 

He feels a flicker of...something. Something of her, the real _her_ , despite the way her mind is permeated by evil, and he grabs onto it. He thinks carefully about her words. About what they might mean.

"Everything you said before," he begins, in a hesitant whisper. He blocks out any thought of the hut, shielding the memory from Palpatine.

"I meant it. I still do," she insists, and then, her face another fraction closer, "Ben."

He wants to believe, that he can seize this part of her that's still herself, that he can use it to defeat the encroaching darkness trying to capture her.

She closes the final distance between them, kissing him gently. Her skin feels cold, but this kiss is so undeniably similar to the one they shared before that Ben finds himself falling right into its drugging power.

But her hand is scrabbling between them, reaching for his own hand that rests on her waist, and when he attempts to pull back, to question her, she only seals the kiss more firmly.

When their fingers finally meet, trapped in the tight space between their bodies, she presses something into his hand. He deepens their kiss for a second time, right as he gasps, as he registers what she's given him.

His father's dice. Smooth, gold, with that thick chain connecting them. A little slick, perhaps from the sweat on her palms. He clenches his fist around them, opens his eyes, and finds hers staring back at him.

A fraction more hazel than they were a moment ago. She nods.

"Yes." He whispers softly, nodding back.

He wanted to believe her. And now he knows he can.

The kiss ends, she steps back, and he slips the dice into his pocket as she takes his hand and they both turn towards the throne. They walk slowly, purposefully, in unison, and Palpatine emerges from his perch, grinning. 

"I see my years spent guiding you were not in vain," he looks at Ben, chuckling. "But it was only her love, which could ultimately turn you."

Ben swallows, eyes tripping over the stairs. "She is powerful in so many ways." Palpatine nods. "More powerful than I think we can know."

"She is my grandchild, of course I know her power!" Palpatine's arrogance flares, the same way Ben has seen it do a thousand times when he was in other bodies, using other voices.

His greatest weakness is his certainty of victory. Though he may have been defeated in the past, he is sure he will ultimately win. Time and time again, that certainty has blinded him to the strengths of his enemies. 

Just as it's doing now.

He beckons them up the stairs. They pass the dais that sits halfway, parting to walk around it, then Rey retakes his hand as they reach the pinnacle, where the throne rests.

"Do you, Kylo Ren and Darth Perfidia, accept the mantle of the Sith throne, dedicate your lives to the Darkness, and commit yourselves to control of the galaxy? Ruling, as equals, over all life, from the nearest systems to the furthest and most barren planets?"

They both nod, and Palpatine seems almost giddy. "Do you swear to rule under my guidance, to accept and act upon my wisdom, and in return let us become the most powerful family to ever exist?"

Ben shudders at the use of that word, _family._ It was family that condemned both he and Rey to all they have suffered. 

It will be a source of suffering for them no longer. 

Ben feels that same creeping cloud of power overtaking his mind, just as he'd seen it do to Rey.

He lets it in, fights it only enough to remain aware of himself, his real self. But he lets it take over enough to convince Palpatine that his agreement is true.

Just before he loses control, his finger flips open the lightsaber, bringing red, spitting light into the dusky room.

He watches in the corner of his eye as Rey's hand emerges from the folds of her cloak, her own saber, glowing blue, coming to life. Somehow, she's summoned it. 

"What is th-" Palpatine splutters, staring between them, but especially at the weapon held in Rey's hands.

"She is more powerful than both of us know." Ben repeats, and feels his arm press against Rey's.

Palpatine's face becomes a mask of madness and rage. He raises his left hand, fingers held like claws, and Ben sees the crackling light webbing between them. 

With a wordless cry meant to give them courage, they both charge forward, determined to destroy the man who both ruined their lives and brought them together. 


	2. Do Well By Us

They fight, and slowly, agonizingly, the battle becomes one of attrition.

At the start, Rey's blows land with cunning precision and Ben's with unprecedented strength. Palpatine's lightning fills the room, bringing the stones down around them, demanding they use Force shields to prevent being crushed.

Incrementally, Rey's aim flags, and Ben's strength wanes. But so does the Palpatine's reach, which allows them to draw closer to him, until he's within the radius of their sabers once again.

Rey's cloak has torn open, her shoulder scraped raw and dripping blood onto the stairs. Ben's left forearm has seen his sleeve singed away. Pink, blistering burns throb hot in spidery lines across his skin: where Palpatine managed to just touch him with his lightning before Rey was able intercept its path with her weapon. 

As the sickly, half-dead man before them continues to fight, his reach into their minds falls away, too.

First, that miasma of dark power clears from Ben's psyche. His brain feels clear again.

Then, Darth Sidious' quiet, hovering presence over his thoughts breaks down too. Ben nearly sobs in relief, still parrying shots of lightning and attempting to advance. He can speak to Rey again.

 _I'm getting weaker_ , he sends across the bond.

 _I can sense it. So am I_ , Rey admits, and with one flick that sends blue light dancing across her face, a bolt thrown by Palpatine is deflected into the far wall of the throne room, blowing a massive crater into the rough blocks of granite. 

_We can't leave him weakened,_ Ben says, though of course Rey already knows, _he'll always find a way to come back._

 _He has to be gone for good,_ she concurs.

There's a note of anguish in her voice that Ben doesn't like. 

_Go,_ he sends her, meaning it with every facet of his being, _go back to your ship. Go back to everyone. Let me finish this._

 _NO,_ she thunders back, before his message is even finished, _no. You cannot defeat him and survive._

_I won't survive._

She gasps. I _won't let yo-_

_I won't survive, but you will._

Ben lands a blow to Palpatine's torso, just a glance off his left side, and the Sith lord cries out, throwing a dome of his own electric power around him as protection.

Ben's eyes dart to Rey's for a split second, and that note of anguish in her voice is utterly, nakedly in control of her. 

She looks as though she's already lost him. "I'm not leaving here without you."

He wants to fight, wants to protest, wants to convince her to save herself.

But he sees that look in her eyes, and he knows, as in every moment of her life before this one, he cannot change her will.

She spins her saber, hitting Palpatine's shield with a succession of rapid, pinging blows, until eventually it sputters out and dies. They both jolt forward, attempting to rush him, but before they can, there's a pulse.

Like a shockwave, coming from outside the temple, coming from the very atmosphere itself, so low it can only be felt rather than heard. It resonates through every molecule of stone and every cell in their bodies, seeming to vibrate the very air.

It projects a strange, clear image into his mind:

Of a vast, empty space, with no borders or dimensions, only infinite emptiness. From the left side of his view, dark curls of smoke bend and beckon across the limitless space. 

To meet it, at the very center of his vision, is a white glow, bold and dense, like light transmuted through dusty air.

Ben fights the vision, fights to peer into Rey's own internal eye, only to see the same thing playing there. 

Palpatine, however, looks unfazed after recovering from the Rey's volley of hits. Having reignited his shield, he's using it to push them both back haphazardly down the broad steps, towards the vast open space of the room, now half-obscured by rubble.

This vision is theirs, and theirs alone.

Ben allows it to snap back over his consciousness, slowly retreating as Palpatine's shield demands, and once he's given himself over to the vision, he gasps.

The dense, oily black smoke intrudes into the space hemmed by the pale glow. Ben feels himself squint, staring at it, and then - _oh._

The light melds into one solid beam where it touches the dark. But as he turns his head, tracing the path of the light...

...it has two sources.

Whatever manifests such raw, clean power is not one locus, it's two.

_Two sources of light; two Jedi._

_One writhing black plume of evil; one Sith._

He feels the knowledge dawning on Rey just seconds after it did upon him.

 _Do you realize what this means?_ she sends into his mind, her voice suddenly echoing more, perhaps because of this boundless space they inhabit. 

_It's only with both of us that-_ Ben falters, as the lightning surges once more, and throws off the defensive way he's proffering his saber.

 _It takes both of us to balance him,_ Rey finishes, and there's a note of sad resignation in her voice: she already knows.

He says it anyway. _And do you realize what that means?_

He hears her pained gasp, almost like it's preceding a sob, both in his mind and from where she stands in the chamber.

 _It will take both of us to defeat him,_ she says, tremulous, providing the unneeded answer to his unneeded question.

Ben panics that it will hurt her, desperate for another way, but as a million possible plans race across his mind he knows none of them, not a single one, will bring him the outcome he wishes. 

One of them can die, and weaken Palpatine enough that he may lie dormant for several generations, gathering strength from the darkest and most depraved shadows of the Force before he rises again.

And one of them would live, to fight him then perhaps, to weaken him once more.

Or both of them can die. And all of their power, fused as one and given completely, can vanquish him forever.

He's sick at the thought that she will never have a family. That she will never know rest, or safety, or peace.

But it's the only way.

 _It's everything, Rey. Everything and everyone,_ he reasons with her. _That's what we have to protect._

 _I don't want you to,_ she insists, voice raw and desperate, _Ben this was supposed to be your chance. To become who you wanted, to atone for all of it. To be a good man, the one the galaxy needs. To learn to love yourself._

 _To learn to love me,_ she adds, her voice gone softer, somehow more desperate still.

 _I don't need to learn that, Rey,_ he insists, and with gritting of his teeth and an ugly roar, plunges his saber straight into Palpatine's shield. It falters, then disappears. _I already love you._

She tries to speak, tries to refuse, but all that comes out is a broken sound, right as her saber connects just barely with Palpatine's neck. 

She manages to rend a shallow wound as he falls to the ground, but he takes advantage of her weakness and flicks her saber away with a wild thrust of his arm.

Ben closes the meter between them and takes her hand, staring at her bright, tormented eyes. Her tears create tracks in the dirt on her beautiful, heartbroken face.

This is all too fast, too sudden, he wants to tell himself. 

But the knowledge, of the truth of this, of the rightness of it, comes from some ancient place inside them. Some place that has existed long before this moment.

"Ready?" He asks her, seeing in the corner of his eye as Palpatine fights to rise to his feet once more.

Rey swallows hard, and he can feel the flood of words waiting just behind her lips.

She holds them back. She understands.

She nods. "I love you."

A blast of lightning hits them both, throwing him to his knees, and Rey sinks down to match him. Their hands tether them together, and in unison, their free palms raise in Palpatine's direction.

Their bodies suffer the damage of his blows, but not their minds.

They both give themselves over fully to the endless landscape, to the two beacons of light emanating from somewhere unseen and unknown. That same, ancient place.

The beacons continue to merge and mix. And in their unification, it grows.

Ben can feel the pure power overtaking him, flowing through where his hand clutches Rey's, crowding out the searing pain in his limbs and organs.

Somehow, despite Palpatine's every effort, despite the last vestiges of his strength devoting fully to the attack, their bodies survive long enough for all of it to reach completion.

In that endless, gaping space, where nothing exists but everything is governed, the dark presence shivers, and shudders, the white glow pressing and pushing and taking it apart.

On Exegol, the last corporeal form of Sheev Palpatine shivers too, and shudders too, and his lightning flickers out, blue webbing disappearing from the unmoving but connected bodies before him.

The tips of his fingers, the vector for his weaponry, collapse in on themselves.

He watches in horror, his power sapped. What is left of it is unable to overcome the blinding light that subsumes him. His arms fold inward, his robes turning to dust. Errant pieces of his skin fall like ash to the ground. 

Anyone who looked would say those two bodies were dead. But somewhere, on some other plane, their souls persist, long enough to dissolve every atom of the greatest evil their world has ever known. 

When not even a wisp of smoke remains to bear witness that he ever existed here, not even an echo of his cruel laugh to remind anyone of who he was, the products of his power begin to fall, too.

His ships plunge from the sky, vanishing before they could even hit the ground. The temple crumbles, the stones transform into the sand that lays beneath them. The wind blows away the pile of dust that was once his robe.

Carried on the air, there are whispers.

_I love you._

_For everyone, and everything._

_What choice will you make?_

_You're not alone._

The endless place, the borderless void that housed the Dark and the Light, is gray.

Silent.

Balanced, at last.

Only the half-destroyed walls of that lone room are left. Two bodies lie, facing the blinking stars above, eyes open. 

Before anyone can find them, and realize what they've done, their bodies vanish too, evanescing in tandem into that silent, balanced place.

\-------

Seven hours later, Finn tears free from the ship, stumbling across the sand.

He let the distant, crude calling he felt from the Force lead him here. It acted as his guide. He told Poe when to make the jumps, and which way to navigate.

Now, as Finn approaches the rubble, he hopes desperately that blurry instinct was wrong.

But as he surmounts a chunk of stone and reaches the center of the ruins, he falls to his knees and cries out.

Two sets of clothing, two pairs of shoes, and two sabers rest before him, no bodies within to wear them. 

He howls at the loss. Fathoms away, on the ship, Poe listens to that distant wail and falls heavily into the pilot's chair.

A tear tracks slowly down his face, and his fingers hover over the comm in his hand. 

\-------

Despite being visited by Luke, despite all the stories she's heard of Jedi after death, Rey didn't expect to wake up.

Still, her eyes blink open.

She is whole. Uninjured. It's like the massive, bloody wound to her shoulder and the barrage of lightning that veritably seared her body never existed. 

She's in a tunic and leggings. No arm wraps, no blaster holster, no boots. She can discern no temperature, no atmosphere, no nothing. As if the empty space before her is absent any air.

Air.

She realizes with a start she isn't breathing. Yet she feels no urge to draw breath, no clawing desperation for oxygen. She feels as she often did, when inhaling and exhaling had become an afterthought, something she didn't even notice.

So it's really happened, then. She feels her eyes moisten. 

Even in death she can still cry.

She's really gone.

She hoped, for the briefest, most naive moment, that they were wrong. That their life forces were stronger than they knew, and that after he was defeated, there might be enough left of them to come back, to remain in the world. 

With a gasp she looks around, dreaming beyond dreams that she might see him there, lying next to her, as they did when they left life.

But she's alone. She's lying on silver sand, a color she's never seen before, and when her bare palm touches it, it feels cool, but not a single grain clings to her skin. 

When she stands, she realizes this is the place. The place that housed the light and dark, the boundless vision that revealed the truth to her and Ben. The truth of what they had to do.

It's sand, and a gray sky above like an overturned bowl, extending all the way to the horizon, flat and unbroken in every direction.

She closes her eyes, goes inward. She doesn't know if the Force is the same here, or if it works differently. She doesn't know if it's still here at all.

She searches, the same way she would have before.

She doesn't feel him. Not even a distant glimmer, the one she always felt after they first met, no matter how distant he was. No matter how much Kylo and how little Ben was present in him.

She feels a panic rise up inside her. And with it, anger.

So this is her fate? To spend the afterlife alone, after all she did, all she gave? Didn't she earn something more? To be selfish in death as she never, not once was in life?

Those tears, proven possible in this realm, begin afresh.

For a brief, startling second she considers another reason she can't feel him.

Because he isn't in this dimension. Because her sacrifice, and a portion of his life force, but only part of it, were enough to win. 

He's still there. Recovering, planning his future. Slowly gaining the trust of those she cared about, proving that he's Ben Solo again, and that he wants to be. 

She knows just as quickly that it can't possibly be true. She felt the way their energy surged, and she felt the way it snuffed out. She sensed his essence sublimating as did her own.

But as that panic continues to ebb and flow inside her, she lets the fantasy of his survival keep her from the tipping point of hysteria. She feels itchy and manic, and rises to her feet.

This endless landscape is the same in every direction. So she chooses the way her feet were facing when she woke, and she walks.

Walks for hours, days, she can't tell, in this place where time can't be measured, not even by the span of her breath.

Her bare feet on the strange new sand are completely silent. 

She wishes for a moment they didn't do it. That they found a different time to confront him him, later. That they had defeated him, later. Just so that she might have had more time with the man reborn, the one she never even got to know. 

But just as she knows they both had to die, she knows it was their only chance. She knows it was the right choice. 

The repetitive motion of her steps soothes her, enough to keep her putting one foot in front of the other, as silent tears course down her face. As she mourns the life she never got to have, and an eternity she doesn't deserve.

\-------

Rose stands before the bedraggled remains of the Resistance. 

She tries not to think about the fact that her face is being broadcast to more holo networks than she can even imagine. 

The shocked silence in the room before her is mirrored across every star system where her visage is projected.

"It was the only way to find a point of balance, among those powers." She says, quoting directly from Finn, to whom she shoots a nervous glance. He nods, gravely but reassuringly. "Neither one could exist without leaving a vacuum on the other side, through which the opposing power could rise." 

Her eyes drift over the few dozen stricken faces before her. "There are no longer any people, ordained by supernatural abilities, to oppress us." She says it with triumph. "But there are also none of them still alive to lead us." She takes a deep breath. "We, the regular people who comprise the whole of the galaxy now, must find a way to lead ourselves. As we have always intended, our leaders, the powers that will guide us, must be chosen by _us,_ and not by the Force any longer."

She hesitates to add the next statement, printed starkly on the datapad before her, but another nod from Finn fortifies her.

"Finally, we must acknowledge the true meaning of Balance. Should we choose to seek out those with a connection to the Force, to let them grow more powerful in the Light, we must do so consciously, knowing all the while, that the Dark will answer. We cannot raise heroes without creating the potential for their enemies. We must keep this principle foremost in our thoughts." Another deep, shaky breath.

"Galactic Senators," her voice begins to wobble, "inhabitants of every system," her eyes well up, "we are all the universe has left. Let us not squander this final chance we have, to rebuild something free from the extremes we never understood and could never control."

After the speech is done, and the broadcast ended, her fellow fighters mill around, speaking in hushed grim tones. He approaches her.

Finn leans down far enough for his forehead to press against hers, and she lets the sense of comfort it imparts fill her up, chase out the lingering terror of speaking to the galaxy.

So many people who now, after so much recent death, look to _them_ for leadership. 

"You're sure she's really gone?" Rose asks, her voice high and uncertain, reaching for Finn's elbows to pull him a fraction closer.

"I'm sure," he whispers flatly, his eyes sliding shut. 

"And he-"

"He turned before he died." Finn mumbles, and he shakes his head minutely, still accepting that truth. "I could sense it somehow, that he was in the Light when they came to the end." 

"Neither of them could have killed him on their own," Rose intuits, and Finn hums his assent. "They needed each other."

"They needed each other in a lot of other ways, too," Poe chimes in softly, and when Rose looks over, his gaze is far away. 

\-------

Here's what Rey's learned about being dead:

She doesn't need to breathe, but she can inhale and exhale, if she wants to. She never gets hungry, or thirsty, or needs to relieve herself. There's no sense of time, no star to bring light, or rotation of the landscape to mark the days. She never feels too hot or too cold. 

But she still gets tired. She walks for days, towards an unchanging horizon. She runs sometimes, relishing the burn in her muscles as she sprints across that strange metallic sand, and when she grows to exhausted to continue, she lies down in the sand and falls asleep. 

She passes what feels like weeks that way. 

She thinks back to her time alive, to her frequent certainty that she was alone. 

She had no idea what that word really meant. At times it overcomes her, the reality that she is now truly and unceasingly isolated.

She can't believe she ever thought to choose this solitude, when she went to Ahch-To. 

She sprints suddenly, then settles into the endless median pace of her running. She pointlessly breathes hard in and out, just to feel something human again. 

The same thoughts she's had countless times flash across her mind.

_She will never see him again._

_She will never see her friends again._

_She'll never touch him, get to know his body the way she secretly, quietly hoped she would._

_She'll never again feel the lush air on a jungle planet cling to her skin._

_She'll never get to visit Rose's home planet with her._

_Never help Finn track down where he came from._

_Never stare into the eyes of the man who redeemed himself, who atoned. Never have the chance to love him._

It brings her no less grief than when these realizations first crept into her mind.

She runs, and mourns, and wonders, in the most frequent thought of all, why it has to be this way.

\-------

Ben wakes with a start, in a cold sweat. 

It's the third night he's slept in a bed, as opposed to that strange solid sand outside. 

He walked for what must have been months, so long that sleeping on that sand felt normal. He'd forgotten what a mattress felt like. He can't say how long he's been here.

If _here_ is even a way to describe this place.

He couldn't explain what compelled him to move. Clearly there was nothing to walk _to._

More aptly, it was about what he was walking _from_. All the emotions he couldn't process. All the terrifying truths he was forced to face. 

_He won't get the chance to prove himself._

_No one will ever get to see the man he could have been, if only he'd have lived._

_No one will get to see the leader, or the lover...the father he might have become._

He laid in the sand, sobbing, for longer than he thought he was capable of. He got up, walking for a while, until it became too much again.

The one small flare of solace that keeps him going is that he died a better man. He saw it in her eyes, as she realized he had made a different choice. 

It propels him through endless days dragging one foot behind the other. 

Once, he tries meditating. It was a part of his Jedi training, which is now a literal lifetime behind him, but he remembers the techniques. 

He remembers one especially well, that Luke taught him.

A way of immersing oneself in memories. 

During training, he used it to swim in the few happy memories he had with his parents. 

With Snoke, he used it to relive his darkest moments of betrayal and disappointment, to fuel his power within the Dark.

Now, he uses it to visit her. He finds himself coming back to that time she delivered herself to his ship. When the pod opened, and he looked down at her, and she looked up at him. There was trust in her gaze.

It was the first time anyone had looked at him that way. 

The potency of the memories grows the more he practices. At first it's just the sights he can recall, but soon it is the sounds, smells, the temperature...all of it. 

He thinks he might be able to endure eternity alone, if he can escape to his past in this way. 

Then, one day, he emerges from his deep, half-conscious state and cracks his eyes open. He blinks, eyes focusing on the still, gray sand. 

There's a speck on the horizon. 

No more than a pinprick rising off its flat plane, but...something. 

Ben sprints for it, endless possibilities, none of them seeming real, coming to mind. The half crumbled throne room on Exegol? The lone hut on Ahch-To, the one he thinks of as Rey's? The rusted out body of the Falcon?

But no matter how hard he runs, it never gets closer. 

After days of exhausting himself, he finally tries a new tactic. 

He sits down. Breathes, though he knows he doesn't need the air. There is no air here to need. 

He meditates. He sees Rey's face inside that pod. The fidelity in her eyes.

He sees the speck. He beckons it.

When his eyes slip open, it's a fraction larger.

He's never able to run towards it, until the day when recognition finally sparks.

Tatooine. 

The house where his uncle was raised, before R2 found him, before Leia's plea, before Obi-Wan. 

Before everything that led to...him. To Ben.

His father showed him a holovid once, of the low, round house. Of Owen and Beru. Of the endless sand and rocky hills that surrounded the place.

The rocks are gone. Only endless sand, and the lone house.

 _Why this place?_ Ben keeps asking himself, but as he finally approaches the structure, he stops questioning it. 

He's relieved for something, anything, that makes him feel like a person once more.

He sleeps in the bed. Eats the food kept in an underground cellar, though he feels no hunger. He bathes, though he knows it's unnecessary. The limited store of water in the farm's collection cistern never seems to deplete.

The first two mornings he wakes up as though he was never asleep at all. No yawning, no crust in the corner of his eyes. Just smoothly sitting up, fully alert, like flipping the switch on a droid. 

He can't even say that it's morning. The light outside never changes.

But that third morning, if he can call it that, is different. He jolts awake, as from a nightmare, though he can't recall one. 

Every inch of his skin is slicked with sweat. And...his heart is racing.

He presses his hand to his chest, hard.

His heart hasn't made a single beat since he first woke up on the sand.

Yet now it pounds, as though in fear, or surprise, or from exertion.

He takes those superfluous breaths, falling back onto his pillow, and slowly, his heartbeat fades, both the sound and the sensation slipping away.

But just before he can fall asleep again, he hears it.

A wordless, broken cry. 

Of fear, or surprise, or from exertion.

He knows that sound.

He bolts from the bed, thrusts himself out from the place where the house is pitted into the earth and onto the sand above.

The cry doesn't ring out again, but Ben can still sense its echo, sense the direction from whence it pealed.

His heart beats again. And this time, it doesn't stop.

\-------

Rey can't help when she cries out. She's in the middle of running, wiping away the tears that blur her eyes, when suddenly it's there before her.

There was never a shadow or a glimmer far off in the distance. Never something on the horizon.

It simply appears, in the second it took for her to run her loose fists across her eyes. 

A structure, round and low, seeming to slope downwards into some sort of depression in the sand. No more than half a mile off.

She can't help herself when she cries out, her shock is so complete. 

The emptiness of this place was a constant. A surety.

Until now.

She stands in awe and confusion, wondering if she should approach, wondering what this place is. _Is there evil and pain to be found within? How would she find out without trying?_

With a jolt inside her own skin, she realizes it.

She's begun sweating. She's been running for weeks, for endless stretches of time, and her body never bore any evidence of the effort. No sore muscles, no perspiration, no thirst.

Yet now, she feels it prickling on her forehead and arms, and she gasps, trying to process her shock.

Just as it's abating, a second pulse takes hold of her anew.

Cresting the ridge of sand with silent steps, the same silent steps that have carried her here. 

There he is.

Pale and fierce in the odd gray light, wearing the same simple dark clothes he died in. He's gasping, staring, his mouth hanging open.

Rey's heart awakes and stutters into a fearful, disbelieving rhythm. 

She runs again, but this time, finally, towards something.

Yet the distance between them doesn't close. She pushes herself faster and faster, tears flowing freely, but she can't get any nearer, and neither can he.

Finally he yells for her to stop, the first word either of them has spoken, and she does, collapsing to the sand.

"Stop," he repeats, catching his breath, and Rey realizes that she's dragging huge lungfuls in too, that she needs it now, the same way she did in life. "Close your eyes."

"But what if you dis-" she says in terror.

"Trust me!" He insists, his voice so desperate, and she bites off the rest of her words. She stares at him for a long moment, drinking in the sight of him, horrified that if she even so much as blinks he'll be gone.

But she does trust him. So she lets her lids fall shut, two more tears escaping, and he sighs.

"See me here. Focus on me. Picture it. Meditate with it." Rey nearly sobs from relief at the sound of his low, commanding voice.

But she knows she can't sob and meditate in the same moment. So she forces down her chaotic emotions, does as she's told, pictures him there. Pictures all the details. The unnatural sand. The way his left sleeve is stretched from how he constantly holds the edge in his fist. The way his sweat had gleamed as though there were some true source of the strange, watery light here.

She hears a gasp, and it sounds far closer than it would have, before.

Her eyes slide open.

He stands before her. Looming over her. Staring down, with reverence and hope and disbelief written across his features.

"Rey," he whispers, and reaches for her hands, pulling her up to standing, tears gathering in his eyes.

She wants to ask him every question she's had since she woke up here. She wants to beat him on the chest, to scream of how she wishes he were still alive. She wants to sob and wail for all the pain she has caused her friends, despite the sacrifice having saved them.

But there's something she wants more than any of that.

She reaches up and he receives her, arms wrapping around her waist, clutching her to him as their lips meet, as she tries to fathom this feeling she thought she would never have again. Her hands scramble to catalogue every inch of his back, his shoulders, his hair. To assure herself that he's solid and real, that even among this barren place they found each other. 

He hitches her up in his arms, her legs finding home around his waist, and their lips part, only long enough for them to draw a newly necessary breath. As though the presence of one another makes them more human again.

They trudge down the slope of the sand and he's on her in a second, pushing her up against the side of the house, as desperate to assure himself of her tangibility as she was of him.

She tears her mouth away from his, traces her hands over his beautiful face. Struggles to catch her breath as she takes in those dark eyes.

She slips out from where she's pinned, taking his hand.

She leads him inside the house, instinct guiding her to the sleeping alcove, and she turns to look at him. 

Backs towards the bed. 

He follows, and she slips her hand under the hem of his shirt, just barely skimming her fingertips over his bare hip.

"There's so much we can't do anymore, now that we've left life behind." 

He shudders, and she feels a familiar, pleasant ache begin in a part of her she has no name for. She can see the evidence of his own familiar, pleasant ache, pressing from within his trousers.

"But some things have remained," he murmurs back, "things we never got to do, before."

"I want all of it now. All the things we missed," she beseeches.

"I'll give you everything I can," he breathes, his voice laden with promise, and her hand comes fully under his shirt.

\-------

After their tongues and hands and bodies have learned what they always wished to know, after they have shouted their pleasure into a world that isn't listening, after they have brought each other ecstasy that seems it would have been impossible during life, they lie in the silence together.

He feels warm. 

It's the first warmth Rey's felt since waking. Now, pressed against him from shoulder to ankle, she feels _alive_ again.

She breaks the stillness with a whisper.

"He lied."

Ben starts to hum, to question her, but instead peers into her mind. He sees Palpatine there. He sees the vision the man had plunged into Rey's mind, of her father, _his son_ , fleeing til he found Jakku, heart torn apart as he left his daughter behind, to protect her.

"It was false," she presses, "the vision, the story, all of it.'

"He knew how desperately you sought a family."

"And he was sure my desperation would make me weak."

"Nothing could make you weak," Ben comments, his voice hardening.

"He couldn't bear the idea of a great enemy rising from nothing. That someone with the potential to defeat him could have grown up as no one."

Ben is quiet for a long moment, stroking her arm, thinking back to her life, his life. What they have now, together.

"You may have been born as no one, but you didn't die that way."

She nuzzles deeper into his side, listens to his heart, and drifts away into her first true sleep.

\-------

When he wakes up for the fourth time in that bed, arms wrapped around her and his face buried in her soft, tangled hair, he knows the morning to be true.

Twin suns rise outside, lending a golden cast to the strange gray sand. The light spills into their small canyon and slices in through the large windows, falls across their bare skin. 

The barren place slowly feels, and looks, more like where they belong. Familiar spirits begin to appear, to visit. Spirits they thought were lost to death, too.

The galaxy rebuilds without them, while they seek and find everything they couldn't have within it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this is what you wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> All speculations, disagreements, arguments, and commiserations are welcomed, both in the comments or at 7sevenbetter@gmail.com.


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